Using Android Vitals
Last modified on Thu 27 Apr 2023

“Never allow the same bug to bite you twice.” Steve Maguire

Android Vitals is a part of the Google Play Console that allows you to have a deeper insight into the stability of your app on Android devices up to the last 3 months.

It can be accessed by navigating to your app on Google Play Console and in the menu on the left dropdown the “Android vitals”. From there, you can access Overview, Performance, Crashes and ANRs, and App size options with unique insights into the performance of the app.

Selecting the “Crashes and ANRs” option will show you a list of issues based on how frequent they are, from there, you can choose any issue and inspect it more thoroughly. The details screen will contain information about the failed method, such as the number of affected users and graphs depicting the affected users' setup (App version, OS version, device). You can also inspect the stack trace for more information about the occurrence of the issue.

The "App size" option shows a comparison of the size of your app and the average size of the apps in your peer group, as well as the difference between older versions of your app. You are also offered recommendations for optimizing the size of your app.

The “Performance” dropdown menu offers the possibility to improve your app’s performance by integrating the Android Performance Tuner, which enables you to find the most effective way to deliver the best possible experience to each of your users by helping you to measure and optimize frame rates, graphical fidelity, loading time, and loading abandonment across many Android devices at scale.

The most useful tool to you as a developer is the “Overview” option, where you are presented with graphs depicting your app's performance compared to the peers’ median and the bad behaviour threshold. Going into details, you are able to filter out the behaviour by app version (“Artifact”), Android OS version, device, and location of the user. By choosing “View details” under one of the graphs, you will be navigated to the “Android vitals details” page with detailed information about the performance of the app split into five tabs.

Stability

Under the stability tab, you can go into details about crashes and “App not responding” rates.

Loading

The Loading tab gives you insight into the startup times of your app.

Cold start is when the app is completely closed, and warn start is when you kill the app and then immediately open it again, in which case all app processes have not been killed yet so the start of the app is a bit faster than the cold start. Hot start is opening the app from the background.

Rendering

The Rendering tab examines how fast your app displays frames on the screen

Battery

Under the battery tab, you are given a better insight into the excessive usage of the users’ battery

Permissions

Here you can see the percentage of users who have denied permissions to your app